Among developers of workstation software, it is increasingly important to provide a flexible software environment while maintaining consistency in the user's interface. An early attempt at providing this type of an operating environment is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,686,522 to Hernandez et al. This patent discusses a combined graphic and text processing system in which a user can invoke a dynamic menu at the location of the cursor and invoke any of a variety of functions from the menu. This type of natural interaction with a user improves the user interface and makes the application much more intuitive.
The WORD word-processing program and MacWrite word-processing program currently provide a static list of translation programs that are available to use in converting documents. However, there is no capability of adding to the static list dynamically as additional conversion routines are created. Further, there is no system-wide solution to provide dynamic opening of files that are otherwise unrecognizable to the operating system. Today, when a file is selected, and clicked on to initiate opening on a Macintosh.RTM. computer or other computer system, if the operating system has not been preprogrammed to recognize the unique characteristics of the particular file, or if the application for handling the file has not been installed, then a standard prompt is issued to the user indicating that processing cannot proceed.